Security Principles and Challenges in Electronic Voting

An electronic voting system aims to cast and record votes of the legitimate voters while providing an adequate level of security in the way the votes are cast. These require eliminating the link between the voter and the vote, and at the same time, providing an audit trail for validating the counting and tallying processes. Voting is a critical principle of democracy, and to achieve an accurate vote recording, storing, and reporting, the designed system must be reliable, and tampering and fraud-resistant. Moreover, the architecture of the system must prevent user mistakes, and technical errors and drawbacks. This paper classifies the current critical security issues of the e-voting systems in a structured way, to help the e-voting researchers and designers evaluate their systems against them. To this end, it first reviews the system components, authorized user types, and potential threats, and then discusses the confidentiality, integrity, and availability (CIA) issues. The final contribution is introducing and prioritizing the potential security solutions.